Flames of Mana

by Matt Larkin

  “I’m prepared to offer you anything you can dream of,” Morskoi said. “As many mates as you desire, any mates you desire. Pearls, gold, power, authority.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Join Vineta, give us heirs of your bloodline, and you will be a second queen in Baltia.”

  Nyi Rara gaped at Morskoi, exposing her teeth. They wanted to breed her. They thought, instead of one of them consuming her flesh and absorbing her mana, they might actually replicate that mana into their royal bloodlines. Create future generations with her power? Would that even work?

  Certainly, kupua bloodlines worked thus in the Mortal Realm, but Nyi Rara had no idea if she could create such offspring here in Avaiki.

  “I … don’t have time right now,” she finally said.

  “But you will consider it?”

  Nyi Rara nodded slowly, then twirled her tail.

  Morskoi grinned as if he had never in a thousand years expected this to work. Or as if he imagined her choosing him as one of the mates. And now, she couldn’t help but imagine it, wonder …

  A throne in Baltia … she knew it lay in the North Sea, far from Mu, and it wasn’t the throne she’d imagined. But … maybe …

  Maybe when Mu was safe and Hi‘iaka restored …

  “My men caught an eel for you,” Morskoi said.

  Nyi Rara grinned at that, and beckoned them forward. A merman swam from the shadows, holding a still live eel just behind its head, the thing thrashing violently.

  Yes, a little food would not go amiss here.

  When the mer offered her the fish, Nyi Rara snatched it up with fervor and bit down, severing the spine. A succulent medley of flesh and blood filled her mouth and left her euphoric.

  Ah, yes.

  Mer allies in Vineta.

  Maybe it was possible. One day.

  The seafloor had become rougher, like someone had scoured it with coral and shaped it into a frozen mask of pain, undulating and twisted upon itself. The further Nyi Rara pressed in toward Naunet, the greater the pressure around her seemed to grow. Pressure, and a presence, as if something watched her, though she saw nothing but jellyfish and urchins and what might have been an eel slithering into a crevice.

  It had grown so dark she could make out little beyond a few dozen feet ahead of her.

  It would get darker still once she passed into the chasm itself.

  Idly, she wished for Namaka to talk to, though she dare not utter a sound and break the sacred quiet that permeated these depths. Still, even in her own head, a voice would have been welcome. Any sign she was not alone in this tenebrous place.

  All her life, mer had spoken of Naunet in whispers and warned that none ought to swim here. She had passed beyond the utmost boundaries and crossed into the domain of the Elder Deep.

  A vibration now pulsed through the currents every so often, thrumming through her body and disrupting her equilibrium. As if the waters themselves warned a foolish mer to turn back, to swim for Bulotu with all possible haste. Indeed, from there to end this mad projection into the Spirit Realm and retreat to the Mortal Realm, beyond the reach of the denizens that lurked here.

  Despite her intentions, Nyi Rara curled up on the rough seafloor and hugged herself. Her whole body screamed at her to retreat and never again consider this madness. Surely, the ancient mer had forbidden this domain for good reason.

  Another pulse resounded through the waters, leaving her shuddering. Was it truly a warning? No mer swimming here could have missed it. Indeed, no fish swam anywhere near this region. All driven away by the pressure and inexplicable vibrations that now screamed inside her.

  Her tongue darted over her shark teeth until she tasted a trickle of her own blood.

  She had lost her mind.

  Or perhaps Opuhalakoa had deliberately sent her to her death. To the utter dissolution of her soul? Would the Elder Deep consume her completely? Would something else get her before she even reached the goddess?

  Nyi Rara whispered a prayer to the Elder Deep, though she suspected her blasphemy in coming here put her well beyond the point where the goddess might be propitiated with whispered words.

  Her tail tried to refuse her order to swim onward. Her gills locked up until she had to concentrate to force water through them. The effort left her lightheaded. And despite it all, she swam onward. Further and further toward the heart of Avaiki.

  Ahead, a crablike claw the size of a whale rose up from the floor, snipping at the waters before her, though she saw no sign of a body attached to that limb. Perhaps it lay buried in the rock? Grimacing, Nyi Rara swam up and over the claw, giving it a wide berth.

  Beyond, more crustacean appendages jutted from the rocks, snapping and flailing at the waters without any pattern. If monstrous creatures lurked beneath the rock, they must lay on their backs, for those limbs pointed up at the wrong angles. An army of crabs all encased in stone, left in torment and all too eager to shred any who intruded upon their misery.

  Chills wracked her, though the ocean depths rarely bothered mer. But the cold here seemed to burrow down into her bones. It made her tail feel sluggish. It left the webbing between her fingers numb.

  And when she thought things could grow no more oppressive, the seafloor fell away, opening up into a chasm far wider than she could see across. She could feel, though, stretching off into a seemingly limitless void in the distance, and worse, dropping down into oblivion in darkness far below.

  The pressure and the presence both redoubled here, even as another pulse vibrated through the currents and sent her plummeting to the edge of the precipice. Like a timid mortal, Nyi Rara caught herself peering over the edge into the blackness below.

  She shut her eyes, trying to still the trembling. Trying to pretend she did not look upon a gap in the fabric of creation.

  There was … wrath … down there.

  Something beyond time, angry, even as it slept.

  Oh, fuck. Oh, Deep, she couldn’t do this.

  She had to turn back.

  She couldn’t do this.

  This was … suicide of her soul.

  Far out along the precipice she spied an incandescent light. Focusing on it, she recognized it at last. The eye of a taniwha, watching her, waiting to see what she would do. A sea dragon that, based on the size of that eye, she’d guess must stretch three or four hundred feet long. Lounging, seeming almost indifferent to her.

  Here waited a greater child of the Elder Deep, wondering perhaps what its mother would do about an intruder. An unwelcome interloper like Nyi Rara.

  She had come too far, hadn’t she? If she turned back now, all of this meant nothing. Hi‘iaka would be lost. Mu would fall. And, most likely, Kanaloa would win. He would take the Worldsea as his own, becoming like the Elder Deep of the Mortal Realm. A fathomless being waiting in darkness.

  That was his plan, wasn’t it?

  To become his mother’s successor. Staring into the abyss below, Nyi Rara suddenly had no doubt about it. Kanaloa’s ambition was no less than the same domination of a world he’d witnessed from his mother.

  And the Elder Deep could not follow him to the Mortal Realm. Indeed, all life was lucky for that. For if the Elder Deep rose, if it woke in truth and somehow crossed the Veil, a being like that might devour the world. It would swallow cities whole. It would smash islands, drink the seas, and break the land … break the …

  Shatter continents?

  Another vibration thrummed through the waters and left her trembling.

  And she knew it now. Knew that feeling.

  A heartbeat.

  Carried through the waters, the drumming pulse of a slumbering behemoth.

  Before she could think better of it, Nyi Rara flung herself over the gap and swam, descending into the darkness.

  The chasm went on and on, deeper than she’d imagined Avaiki could ever stretch. She’d swum miles down now, seeing little save what the faint bioluminescence of algae lit up.

  The pressure had grown so inten
se it felt like it might pop her scales and crush her bones. Her gills began to struggle to push water through them and each breath became an effort.

  The human half of her wanted to weep. Too scared to even flee. Nyi Rara wasn’t certain the mer half felt any less fear.

  Somehow, hardly aware of it, she managed to keep her tail kicking, pushing her ever deeper.

  The pulsing heartbeat had grown more powerful as she swam closer. Every throb of it hit her like a physical blow, actually managing to slow her momentum for an instant.

  In Uluhai, someone had broken the columns speculating about the true nature of the Elder Deep. They had thought it blasphemy, perhaps, fearing the wrath of the Elder Goddess. This primordial entity that seemed to predate creation. But Nyi Rara had seen it, the broken words where the author had supposed the Elder Deep had conceived its children with a primeval darkness that encompassed the universe. Creation, born of water and pressure and shadow.

  Down here, Nyi Rara could believe it.

  Something in the waters far away moved, disrupting the currents. Not a sudden movement so much as a shifting of something immense beyond imagining. Something monstrous.

  Nyi Rara stifled a whimper, uncertain whether it was better that she could not see. Was the fear of something writhing around out there worse than actually seeing it?

  And then the chasm walls dropped away, opening up into a void beneath Avaiki, one seemingly without bounds. A cavern within the cavern of her world.

  Another pulse, this one actually pushing Nyi Rara backward enough she bumped up against the cavern ceiling.

  What was down there?

  She couldn’t see a damn thing in this inky blackness.

  Could barely breathe. Her gills wanted to quit. Her body wanted to retreat inside itself and hide forever. The power here was a current scraping her scales the wrong way. Scouring her fins. Digging out her insides and hollowing her skull.

  “Please …” she managed to whimper. “Please hear me …”

  The groan that answered shook the world.

  The whole cavern trembled.

  For an instant, Nyi Rara thought all Avaiki would collapse into itself.

  The human side of her mind shut down, simply refusing to accept what was unfolding in front of her. It left Nyi Rara feeling more alone than ever.

  “Please,” she repeated. “I am your child, Nyi Rara, princess of Bulotu and heir of Dakuwaqa ‘Ohana.” Her voice sounded so weak and pathetic down here. None of the regality she’d have managed in the palace in Mu. None of the grandeur with which mer spoke to mortals, believing themselves gods.

  Perhaps they were gods, yes, but the Elder Gods were something so far beyond. Different in kind, unfathomable in thought.

  Every morsel of her flesh demanded she beg forgiveness for this intrusion. That it was, in fact, only right she offer up her soul in supplication to the entity below her. She was struck by the horrifying irrelevance of all society, as if the only purpose of her entire race were sustenance of this thing they worshipped.

  And then an eye opened.

  An eye the size of a mountain, from which billowed incandescent light that served to cast the Elder Deep’s bulk in tenebrous illumination. Another eye opened, then another, a chain of them running along the length of a skull, causing a dance of shadowy waters.

  She had been wrong.

  The horror of the unknown could, in this instance, be eclipsed by the partial revelation of what lay beneath her.

  She tried to scream, but her throat refused to move. Her entire chest had seized up. Her heart clenched in pain, stilled.

  She had been wrong about the extent of terror. But also right about the apocalyptic scale of the Elder Deep. If anything, she had underestimated it. Its rise would destroy the world, would surely cause an eschaton. She could see it, reflected in the god’s eyes, the vision of Mu and the other continents shattering beneath its wrath.

  And now, as if it slept beneath the whole of Avaiki, the behemoth stretched on into those fathomless depths. Waking, the Leviathan could easily shatter the world of the mer with but a shift of its bulk. Though she could not see it all, she gathered it must stretch a thousand miles long or more.

  Its head was like a multi-eyed taniwha, a dragon that might swallow whales and not notice. Somewhere, beneath its mass, rested clawed appendages one might call arms. Amid them, writhing tentacles each large enough to enclose a city and crush it on a whim.

  Despite her breathless, mindless terror, Nyi Rara felt her heart beat.

  Was that merely at the sufferance of the Elder Deep itself?

  Perhaps she should speak. Repeat her entreaty. But she remained paralyzed, whether by the goddess’s power or by her own mind refusing to accept the existence of a behemoth next to which she was less than a minnow.

  From the Elder Deep had come all the mer, the dragons, all the benthic creatures. And too, the Chintamaniya, the Waters of Life, all of it, pulsing outward like each throbbing beat of this thing’s heart.

  And was Nyi Rara the only living mer who had ever looked upon her goddess?

  “K-Kanaloa,” she mumbled. “Kanaloa betrayed you.”

  The history of Mu told as much. That Kanaloa stole the Chintamani stones, though how, Nyi Rara could not even guess. The sheer audacity of sneaking into this chamber … the idea defied formation in her brain. But the he‘e god had stolen from his mother, and, in her rage, she had told the mer how to recover the Chintamaniya and deny them to Kanaloa.

  “H-he stole from you and you trusted your mer children to avenge that.”

  The Elder Deep watched her. Almost like it looked inside her. A pressure built inside Nyi Rara’s head, a presence pushing its way through her mind. Was this the agony hosts felt when spirits took their bodies? Was that what was happening to her?

  Forming words grew even more difficult. “I need to know what he did with the Chintamaniya. I need to find the Waters of Life … and then … I … need …” Nyi Rara sucked down gulps of water as the pressure in her head felt apt to crush her skull to pulp. That, or explode her brain. “I need … to stop … him.”

  The sensation swept over her like a kai e‘e inside her skull. She managed a brief scream before even that was swallowed by the cataract of images bombarding her mind.

  An unstoppable wave of visions that could shatter her consciousness.

  Kanaloa, his bulk filling the dark caverns of the Mortal Realm.

  His tentacle-arms forming eldritch symbols Nyi Rara could not—would not—fathom. The octopus god cut sigils into the cavern that assaulted her very soul. They blasted her mind like steaming geysers.

  A taniwha was in the cavern with the god-king, hardly seeming immense next to Kanaloa’s mass. Holding a flaming pearl, Kanaloa spoke Supernal words even Nyi Rara had not known.

  And the taniwha writhed. It flailed. It shrank, becoming less than the god-king. Smaller, more compact and … Oh. Becoming the first mo‘o. A dragon able to walk freely on land, to take human form, to work Kanaloa’s will.

  With the Chintamani, the octopus god had created his first, most perfect servants.

  And with unfathomable knowledge imparted from the Elder Deep, Nyi Rara knew how. Knew where. All the god-king’s crimes and secrets were laid out before her.

  The visions did not come in any sensical order.

  Rather, they drowned her in their simultaneous barrage. No sense of chronology. Places, events, blasphemies all unfolding at once, rending her mind into pieces.

  She saw Kanaloa over a field of eggs, perhaps gathered from other octopuses, but now, through the influence of the Chintamaniya, advanced. Awakened to become his children. The he‘e.

  She saw a mo‘o servant coiling its way through underwater caverns, reaching the surface. Was that Vai‘i? Yes … with the intuition of the Elder Deep she knew that place. Even as the mo‘o climbed up the mountain, then once again descended into dark tunnels.

  In its claw it held a Chintamani, bestowed by Kanaloa for a singular pu
rpose.

  To grant immortality to his most trusted servants.

  She watched, as the mo‘o made its way into a cavernous deep and there found a spring of black ichor. The poison blood of the Elder Deep. And holding that Chintamani over its head, Kanaloa spoke through the mo‘o. The god-king intoned his Supernal commands, warping the very blood of his mother for his own uses.

  The Elder Deep seethed at the hubris of it. She writhed in discomfort as her own power was twisted back against her and made something unbidden. The poisons coursing through the veins of her truest children—dragons and krakens—they were her life blood.

  And Kanaloa made a mockery of it. Tried to seek its blessings without the price such deific fluid ought to have held within it.

  The black fluid turned clear, pure, vibrant.

  The spring became the Waters of Life, hidden deep beneath the heart of Vai‘i. And true, another spring in far Uluka‘a, and beyond, across the Worldsea, a third, in distant lands beyond Akakor.

  Through the onslaught of visions, Nyi Rara beheld the Worldsea and it was vaster than she had truly realized. She saw the mer kingdoms spread across the Mortal Realm, yet all beholden to the Elder Deep.

  But the mother felt no love for her children.

  Was it whim alone that spared Nyi Rara from oblivion?

  No.

  No, she suspected that while the Elder Deep may have disdained the mer, still she accepted the souls they offered to her. She accepted their worship, if only to feed herself.

  But Kanaloa … that child, she loathed. That child had the temerity to challenge her authority and then fled beyond the Veil, into the Mortal Realm.

  The Elder Deep wanted Nyi Rara to destroy Kanaloa.

  And Nyi Rara would do so.

  20

  Pele’s legs threatened to give out beneath her as she made her way to her palace. Her people would be terrified. They must have heard the screams and no one would have missed the eruption. Dimly, she sensed the lapu watching her. She had no further strength to chastise it or attempt to chase it away. The best she could do was hope the prayers the kāhuna had already spoken would ward the village for the rest of the night. A fragile hope—she didn’t truly know how such things worked.